Kendall-Smith to exit Fujitsu Siemens in strategy change

After four years at the helm Fujitsu Siemens is parting company with joint managing director Steve Kendall-Smith but the other incumbent Paul Parish will remain in place as part of a strategic realignment.

This comes a week after the German Japanese joint venture announced that Fujitsu will buy Siemens 50% stake in the business from 1 April for €450m (£385.6m).

Kendall-Smith had been overseeing the product side of the business and Parish had managed Siemens Business Services since it was acquired in early 2006.

A spokesman at the firm confirmed this morning the exit of Kendall-Smith though a departure date has yet to be set.

"We had two managing directors in the UK but now there will only be one. We have integrated the product and services offerings so it made sense to have one looking after both sides," he told Microscope.

"There has been a realignment of our business direction to transform ourselves into a dynamic infrastructure provider," he said, adding it had told partners and customers in Germany yesterday of the "next evolution" of the company.

This is the first indication - since Fujitsu's announced takeover of the entire business - that its major focus will be on enterprise servers and storage rather than volumes PCs and will serve to fuel industry talk that it may offload the notebook and desktop unit next year with Lenovo tipped as the suitor.

Kendall-Smith joined the firm on 4 July 2004 as sales director for the public sector and then moved to large enterprise sales director before becoming head of the UK. Prior to that, he spent five years at Dell as UK sales director for the public sector.

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